Synthetic monitoring detects availability problems before users do by running automated checks against your applications from outside the system. Unlike logs, metrics, and traces, synthetic checks can detect failures even when your application is not receiving traffic.
Your observability stack tells you what happened inside your system.
But what happens when the system itself is unavailable?
A broken TLS certificate, expired domain, failed API endpoint, or broken checkout flow may produce little or no telemetry because requests never reach your application.
That is the gap synthetic monitoring solves.
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring uses automated probes to continuously test applications, APIs, and user workflows.
Common examples:
- Checking an API endpoint returns the expected response
- Verifying TLS certificates before expiration
- Testing TCP connectivity
- Running a complete browser workflow like login or checkout
Instead of waiting for customers to report problems, teams detect failures proactively.
Synthetic monitoring without another tool
Many synthetic monitoring solutions create another observability silo.
You end up with one dashboard for logs, another for metrics, another for traces, and another for synthetic checks.
OpenObserve Synthetic Monitoring keeps check results alongside your existing telemetry.
Synthetic results can be queried, added to dashboards, and used for alerts alongside logs, metrics, and traces.
Test APIs and real user journeys
OpenObserve supports:
- HTTP checks
- TCP checks
- TLS checks
- SSH checks
For browser monitoring, checks run using Playwright.
Engineers can use existing Playwright scripts or record browser journeys and convert them into monitors.
The same workflows used for testing can also help detect production issues.
Monitor internal applications
Public synthetic checks cannot always reach internal systems.
Private Locations allow teams to run synthetic checks inside their own network using an outbound-only agent.
- No inbound firewall rules.
- No exposing internal endpoints.
- No separate monitoring infrastructure.
Know why something failed
A failed check should provide more than "availability dropped."
Each run includes execution history and failure evidence so engineers can understand:
- Which step failed
- Where it failed
- What the application returned
- Screenshots of browser failures
Instead of only knowing that something broke, teams can quickly understand what happened.
Getting started
Synthetic Monitoring is available in beta on OpenObserve Cloud.
Create a check, choose your schedule and location, and start receiving results in the synthetics_results stream.
Learn more about Synthetic Monitoring at OpenObserve
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